infoTECH Feature

April 06, 2016

NEC Launches New Codec to Solve the 4K Content Delivery Conundrum

According to numbers from IHS (News - Alert) from late last year, 4K Ultra HD televisions saw an impressive uptake last year—unit shipments grew 197 percent year over year in Q2 2015—even as the TV market as a whole continued its decline. In other words, 4K is the next big thing in TV in a way that 3D never managed to be and so it’s now up to content providers to figure out how to supply 4K content. Netflix has been working on a way to boost streaming quality whole reducing bandwidth needs with a new compression method, but NEC (News - Alert) Corporation believes it has a better way.

The IT and network technologies integrator this week announced plans to globally launch the VC-970 encoder and VD-970 encoder in July of this year as part of a new H.265/HEVC codec family. NEC claims this codec family will make it possible to process 4K UHD video in real time.

Seeing as how the question of how to deliver 4K content effectively while considering the average user’s bandwidth restraints has been hanging in the air for some time, this may seem too good to be true. However, NEC claims its new product series is capable of encoding 4K video at approximately one five hundredth of its original size, while performing ultra-low delay encoding and decoding of around 99 milliseconds. It also supports BT.2020 and HDR (News - Alert), a next generation technology that expands the color gamut while increasing brightness.

In other words, it seems that NEC has cracked the 4K conundrum.

"NEC has been driving the development of advanced broadcasting services such as 4K and 8K in an effort to help promote 4K/UHD broadcasting services," said Tooru Watanabe, general manager of the Broadcast and Media Division at NEC Corporation. "This new product series will contribute to the realization and improvement of 4K broadcasting through the use of encoding technology and ultra-low delay technology."

The new hardware-based, and compact sized at 1U half rack, 4K codec is the successor of the first generation model which has a reputation for providing a highly reliable, rich experience in commercial 4K broadcasting services. NEC plans to showcase its new products at the NAB SHOW 2016 later this month.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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